A quiet week in North County as corned beef and cabbage go on sale. Meanwhile, the price of roses and raspberries remains stable.

A raspberry — the Dazed and Confused award — to the Encinitas council for sending enough mixed signals to make the Cardiff Kook’s head spin.

Let’s see if we can tease out the main threads from what appears to be a hairball.

We’re informed the deferred maintenance on infrastructure in Encinitas is staggering. Councilman Tony Kranz tells me the pricetag is $25 million or much more. Got to man up and take care of the problems that festered when the Hall property was stretching the budget. (Footnote: From Interstate 5, you can see the backstops going up in what will be a gorgeous community park.)

The sense of a gathering storm drove the council majority last week to seriously consider a $100,000 study to find out if the voters of Encinitas would be willing to approve a sales tax hike from 8 to 8.5 percent.

This initial stab at putting a tax increase on the November ballot was, to put it mildly, barely a pinprick in terms of policy. The two pro-business conservatives on the council — Kristen Gaspar and Mark Muir — said they were strongly opposed to a survey to pave the way for a tax increase. Because it requires a four-fifths majority to put a tax hike on the ballot, game over.

And yet the council kept its game face on, suggesting in its ideologically split 3-2 vote that a tax study would still be useful despite various ongoing efforts to determine the will of the community on budget priorities.

After a day or two of reflection, however, Councilwoman Lisa Shaffer sent an email to the city manager, Gus Vina: “I want to change my vote” on the study, she wrote. “While I still support the idea, I fear that we are rushing things and will cause confusion and possible harm .... Since we know we won’t have the 4 votes needed to have a ballot measure on the 2014 election, I’d rather wait and consider this at a later time.”

Meanwhile, the council continues to make pathetic pleading noises over the Pacific View School site, a prime piece of property the Encinitas school district has been trying to sell for a decade. After giving the city years to put a deal together, the school district has set an auction date. The council, no doubt fearful of a populist backlash directed its way, keeps sending out the signal, more like a bleat, that somehow or other it can come up with more than twice the $4 million or so it offered and the district summarily rejected as ridiculously low.

Here you have a city that’s so anxiety-ridden about deferred maintenance that it’s considering a major tax increase and it still aspires to go into the arts center business at Pacific Heights?

Encinitas appears to be having an identity crisis. It’s communicating more, but understanding less about what it wants. At some point, leaders need to lead, not listen.